18th Italian Symposium on Advanced Database Systems

June 20th - 23rd 2010, Rimini, Italy

Tutorials

Anonymized Data: Generation, Models, Usage

Divesh Srivastava, AT&T Labs-Research

Data anonymization techniques enable publication of detailed information, which permits ad hoc queries and analyses, while guaranteeing the privacy of sensitive information in the data against a variety of attacks. In this tutorial, we aim to present a unified framework of data anonymization techniques, viewed through the lens of data uncertainty. Essentially, anonymized data describes a set of possible worlds that include the original data. We show that anonymization approaches generate different working models of uncertain data, and that their privacy guarantees can be naturally understood in terms of the sets of possible worlds that correspond to the anonymized data. Work in query evaluation over uncertain databases can hence be used for answering ad hoc queries over anonymized data. We identify new problems for both the Data Anonymization and the Uncertain Data communities.

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About the Speaker

Divesh Srivastava is the head of Database Research at AT&T Labs Research. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and his Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India. His current research interests include data quality, data streams and data privacy.